How Much Does It Cost To Advertise On Instagram?

Each ad will vary in cost. It depends on multiple different factors. In this article, we will outline the factors that determine the cost of running a paid advertisement on Instagram.

On average Instagram marketers can expect to pay $0.50 to $7.00 based on their bidding model and how Instagram ranks their Instagram Ad. The ranking factors are based on Demographics, relevance, and a number of other factors we will look at further.

Prices are given in USD as this is the most common research factor, but we have included € where possible.

If you are looking to increase likes, impressions and follows through your Instagram ads, but are struggling to implement an effective strategy, there is a good chance you have asked yourself the question, “how much does it cost to advertise on Instagram?” Are Instagram ads worth the cost and what are the benefits to you, your business and your brand?

VIMAR is here to answer your questions regarding Instagram ads, provide insight into how much it costs to advertise using Instagram ads and what you and we can do to improve your Instagram ads power and reach.

If you are hoping to use Instagram ads to boost, develop your Instagram feed and reduce the cost of your Instagram ads then continue reading. If you would like to learn more about online advertising and social media marketing at VIMAR, click here[1].

The Effectiveness Of Instagram Ads:

With so many users, Instagram ads have become one of the best ways to advertise and promote products and businesses to an impressively wide audience. This is great news for businesses new and old, however, it can also be daunting because there’s no concrete way to know how much your Instagram ads are going to cost you. This article and the figures suggested for your Instagram ads should be taken as a generalisation.

We’re going to cover a few Instagram ad statistics, the different methods of Instagram advertising, the factors that play into the costs of advertising, and why you should consider taking the plunge.

Instagram Ad Cost & Bidding Models: What are CPM and CPC?

There are two core approaches associated with Instagram ad costs. Due to its format, the actions that your target audience can take are limited and for this reason, only impressions and clicks are considered when discussing Instagram ad costs.

Instagram Ad CPM

Instagram ads CPM refers to the cost per every 1000 times your ad is viewed. As the Instagram ads cap is based on the number of impressions and not the clicks the cost is usually higher for this type of ad spend. It’s important to have clear goals when choosing your Ad type. The average cost for CPM can run up to $7.00 or €6.00, so it can be quite costly and unhelpful if you do not have clear set goals.

Instagram Advertising CPC (Cost Per Click)

CPC stands for “cost per click” which is exactly what it sounds like. Advertisers pay publishers every time a user clicks on their ad, which is known as “Pay Per Click”. CPC (Cost per Click) is the price that the advertiser pays for every click of their PPC campaign.

CPC in its easiest form can be compared to Google ads and the top three results that you find within a search result. You only pay when your ad is clicked on which is ideal for those with correct messaging, powerful ad copy, and a quality CTA.

Instagram CPC average costs are $3.00 or €2.50 per click, expensive, but if implanted correctly it can provide a quality ROI.

The Average Cost Of An Instagram Ad Campaign:

The above-mentioned cost for Instagram CPC and your average Instagram CPM is only estimated and there are a host of factors that we will look at below that will impact the cost of your Instagram ad campaign.

But you can place an average Instagram ad cost of between $3.00 and $7.00 depending on the strategy that you implement and how your target audience is used.

Instagram has several budget options which include:

  • Daily budget meaning you never spend more than the set amount for each day.
  • A lifetime budget meaning you spend the set amount over the lifetime of your campaign. This allows for more detailed Instagram ad scheduling.

These are great options for small SMEs with a limited budget as it also allows you to test your Instagram user audience and your Instagram ads on different Instagram users.

With proper testing, you can better manage your Instagram ad spend.

Instagram Ads & Their Benefits:

  • There are more than one billion Instagram users worldwide with over 2.2 million users in Ireland alone.
  • More than 80% of global users use Instagram to search for products or services.
  • Many instream users follow brands and influencers which can highlight you to an even wider audience if you use proper advertising strategies.
  • The visual aspect of Instagram makes it an ideal location for businesses of all sizes row showcase products and services.
  • Instagram is continually updating its app with a dedicated store function now operational worldwide.

Using the right Instagram ad types and strategies you can grow your brand and following, increase sales and develop a loyal customer base.
In times of rapid change and online development going where your target audience is and paying for the right Instagram ads will make huge differences for your business.

But what factors determined how much you will spend? Let VIMAR explain what effects your Instagram ad costs, and you can better understand where your money goes and whether you chose to use the Instagram services of VIMAR or conduct Instagram advertising yourself.

Launching Your Instagram Ad Campaign:

If you choose to launch Instagram Ads or wish to see how the platform works before you delve further into testing your Instagram target audience, there are three methods that you can employ. These are what we use here at VIMAR when working on our client’s Instagram ad campaigns:

Within the Instagram App:

The simplest way for beginner Instagram marketer to promote their page is through the promotion of existing posts. Choose a post you wish to promote; you will be directed to the cost and promotion section and from here you can launch a CPM campaign and see the numbers that your post receives.

Instagram Ad Manager:

Ad’s manager is the same as Facebook Ads manager. Here you can set your campaigns, budget, length of the campaign and the campaign type that you wish to launch. We recommend taking some time to learn the tools and features of this powerful marketing platform before launching any large-scale Instagram ad campaigns.

Instagram Partners/Your chosen Digital Marketing Agency:

Should you not have the time or experience, but possibly the budget, then another great option is to work with professional Instagram partners or your chosen digital marketing agency.

This gives you more time to plan and work on your Instagram ads campaigns.
When using the help of experienced professionals, you save time on learning the ins and outs of Instagram advertising and can start working on developing your campaigns and business goals.

What Determines Instagram Ad Costs?

Unlike traditional print media ad formats, there is a range of factors that determine online digital adverting costs. Instead of spending on placement and the length of the run of your ad. Instagram ads include these costs and also depend on:

  • Demographics,
  • Ad Placement- Whether it is in the Instagram feed or Instagram Story
  • The Type of Media it is- Carousel ads, Video ads, Image
  • How relevant it is to your audience & Ad Delivery

All these and more play a part in the cost of your Instagram ads. Here we will break down some of the factors that influence how much does it cost to advertise on Instagram:

Instagram Cost & Your Budget

Your budget obviously plays an important role when it comes to how much you pay for your Instagram ads. If you have a small budget, it will likely take longer for you to get past the “learning phase” of your ad campaign.

Costs can be higher when you first start because the system hasn’t learned your campaign types and optimization goals. Over time, if your Instagram ads are well-received and engaged with, your overall costs will be lowered.

Competition & Manual Bidding

How many competitors you have and who they are will affect your ad costs, too. If you’re advertising on Instagram, you can guarantee that there are other companies within your industry doing so as well. This creates competition because both you and your competition are bidding to target the same audience.
It can result in an extensive, expensive bidding war, where you’re constantly trying to outdo your competitor(s). To maintain a top position, you need to consistently outbid them, which can quickly drive your CPC costs up.

It’s important to remember that your ad cost must provide a valid ROI.

Campaign Goal & Objectives:

Depending on what the goal of your campaign is, your advertising costs will change considerably. Some of the Campaign Goals on Instagram include:

  • Brand awareness
  • Reach
  • Traffic
  • App installs
  • Engagement
  • Video views
  • Conversions

As an example, if you choose an awareness campaign goal, your costs will be lower than something that has an objective with a higher value, such as increasing conversions.

In this same example, the awareness campaign is also less expensive because it targets a broader audience and doesn’t target any certain demographic or audience, whereas the conversion-orientated campaign is higher in cost because the users being targeted are more likely to engage in high-value activities – signing up or making a purchase.

Click-Thru-Rate

The Click-Thru-Rate (CTR) is the rate at which your audience clicks on your Instagram ads. If your CTR is low, your costs may be higher as Instagram’s system is likely to detect that your ad is not doing well and that there’s a disconnect between your brand and its target audience.
If your CTR is high, the cost of advertising will be lower. In general, you want to aim for a CTR of 2%, which is considered healthy.

Audience Size

Targeting broader audiences typically means that your costs will be lower than if you targeted a very specific group of people. As you narrow your audience, you will often see the price go up ad your competitors are likely to be targeting those very same people. It is also more expensive to retarget audiences through retargeting campaigns.

Holidays, Special Events, Days of the Week etc.

Company versus company competition peaks during the holidays. During this time, businesses are competing to reach out to audiences and generate more leads, which causes the CPC to skyrocket.

The time during which you’re advertising is, obviously, a crucial factor in how much your Instagram ad is going to cost you.
In addition to holidays, Instagram users tend to use the platform more during the week than they do on the weekends. Your best bet is to post Instagram ads during the week – especially on Wednesdays. Posting on the weekend could be more costly, as fewer users are likely to see your Instagram and Facebook ads.

Instagram Target Audience & Demographics:

Age
Age is a factor of CPC, too. An audience within the age range of 18 to 44 is the most expensive, which makes sense since they are the group that’s most likely to use Instagram and are, therefore, the most valuable.
The most valuable users are also the most likely to engage with your Instagram ads, which, of course, is what makes them so valuable in the first place.

Gender
It costs more to advertise to women than it does to men. Again, this is because women are the most valuable when it comes to advertising, as there are more women and fewer men actively using the platform. They are also more likely to purchase items more quickly during the customer journey.

Industry
Your industry is a CPC factor, as well. B2B businesses see the highest costs since there are fewer of these types of companies on Instagram than there are people to interact with. Industries such as apparel, however, see high costs because there is a lot of competition.

Benefits of Instagram Advertising

Easier Campaign Tracking

When you’re conducting online advertising, it’s always helpful to know how your ads are doing. Luckily, when you use Instagram to advertise, you can track your campaigns in real-time so that you know how they’re doing at any given moment.

Instagram is compatible with various analytic tools that allow advertisers to track several different aspects of their campaign, including engagement and conversions.
This makes it easy to track the ups and downs within a campaign’s run, as well as to monitor how changes affect the success of existing campaigns.
Better tracking and conducting A/B and split testing on your target audience all help to make better more targeted Instagram ads in the future while reducing costs and increasing ROI.

Boosted Brand Awareness

Using Instagram to advertise is beneficial because it helps to increase brand awareness, which then leads to conversions.
Even if your target audience isn’t clicking on or engaging with your ads, if they are following your page or have liked your content, they will still count toward the boosting of awareness of your brand.
This is because the more followers you have, the more often those who are not actively following your brand will come across your ads via the people they follow, who also happen to follow and engage with you. Essentially, every new like, comment or share gets your brand notified by new people – all of which have the potential to become a conversion.

Increased Website Traffic

When you post ads for your business on Instagram, the platform allows them to contain clickable links. These links can lead back to your main website, which, if you’re a seller of any sort, is likely where you do most of your business.

By driving traffic to your website, you’re not only increasing your chances of a conversion, but you’re also increasing the chance of your buyer purchasing more than just one product from you.

How to Lower the Cost of Advertising on Instagram

Utilize automatic bidding

If you’ve never used Instagram advertising before, a good way to lower your costs is by utilizing Instagram’s automatic bidding feature. Automatic bidding will help you to choose which kind of bidding model is best for your campaign.

This is a great way to prevent overbidding and helps you to bid an appropriate amount until you have enough data to guide your campaign by yourself.
A great way to learn and develop manual bidding skills for future campaigns.

Decide on a goal

There are three main goals for ad campaigns: awareness, conversion, and consideration.

  • Awareness simply means that your primary goal is to advertise your brand – to anyone and everyone who can see it somehow.
  • Conversion refers to having a goal that includes conversions whether they be in the form of email sign-ups, product purchases, or subscriptions.
  • Consideration campaigns are geared toward educating your audience about a certain topic, issue, or product

Once you’ve decided on a primary goal, you can tailor your ad strategy to best suit it instead of playing it by ear and going in blind.

Testing

By testing your Instagram ad once it’s complete, you can reduce the amount of money that you spend on the ad. By testing your ad, you can achieve higher ad positioning, which then leads to lower CPC. The whole purpose of testing is to ensure that your ad is as effective as possible from as early in the campaign as possible.

Linking to relevant pages

When a user clicks your Instagram ad, are they directed to the home page of your website? If so, this tip is for you. Ideally, you want your users to be taken to a page that is relevant to the ad that they clicked on.

For example, if your user clicks on an ad for an at-home facial scrub, why would they want to be redirected to your website’s home page, which talks about the company and not the product that had caught their eye before?

Sure, the user could navigate to the appropriate page using your website but, most people aren’t going to do that. Instead, they will click off the site, seeing the extra few clicks as too much work – especially when they weren’t entirely sold on your facial scrub in the first place.

Following this practice helps to reduce CPC costs because it can boost your conversion rates, which often tie into CPC.

Ensure accurate targeting

While it can be tempting to target everyone with the same ad, it’s not that smart of a move. Instead, you should be choosing the target audience that is most likely to engage with your ad and targeting them.

In general, the number of users targeted will be much smaller, but this small group is more likely to turn into conversions, thereby reducing CPC and saving you money that would have otherwise been spent advertising to irrelevant targets.

Take the time to choose your targets wisely and remember, you could always make another ad to target a different group. Not all groups must be targeted within the same ad; in many cases, it’s recommended to use various ads.

A great example of this is a company that sells wedding jewellery targeting anyone and everyone under the sun. Most users will simply look at the ad and pass it by because it’s not relevant to their situation. Others may look just because, but not make a purchase. In both cases, you’re losing money because the user did not engage with your ad in the way that you were intending.

Now, had you targeted that ad toward engaged women you might have seen higher rates of conversion since the ad was more relevant to their immediate needs.

Although advertising on Instagram can be incredibly costly, it doesn’t have to. By targeting appropriate audiences, using automatic bidding, and linking to relevant web pages, you can help keep your costs low and by knowing the factors that play into what makes an audience your ideal target, you can more accurately pinpoint the appropriate audiences.

Unfortunately, there’s no way that we can tell you exactly how much it’s going to cost you to advertise on Instagram. However, we like to think that this article will have helped at least a little.

Final Tips for Your Instagram Ads

Facebook ads and Instagram ads can both be managed in the Facebooks ads manager system. Your Instagram ads budget will vary depending on the ad type, ad placement and length of ad campaign.

You can create Instagram ads in a number of ways including:

  • Video
  • Carousel
  • Image
  • In story

Post engagement is a crucial factor in CPM costs, its important to test these ads and cap the Instagram campaigns costs.

Use custom audiences and effective landing pages to have the best ROI for your investment.

Using VIMAR as your Instagram Advertising Experts

With everything that we have looked at regarding Instagram ad costs and Facebook ads, it can be a complicated affair if you do not have a strategy in place or experience using Instagram ads for your business.

It is possible of course to learn, study and test your Instagram advertising strategy, but this can take quite some time to master. Not only will it take you a considerable amount of time, it will also probably cost you more money. Everyone wants the best ROI. Hiring the help of a professional digital marketing agency such as VIMAR can help you save money in the long term and run better advertisements.

Contract us today for a free consultation. We will work closely with you and together, we will come up with a digital marketing strategy that will help level up your business.